"According to the Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics, districts spent an average of $5,247 per pupil in 1970 (in 2008 dollars). Today, the average is about $12,000. How is it possible that districts could have trouble covering higher gas prices when they have an extra $6,500 to spend per pupil? One reason is that the public school bureaucracy has been doing what bureaucracies do best: growing. Since 1970, total public school employment has nearly doubled to over 6.1 million people, while total enrollment has increased by less than 9 percent. It is to support this army of new public school employees that taxpayers are being asked for more and more funding each year. If the public schools were to return to the student/staff ratio they had in 1970, they would have an extra $100 billion per year with which to fill the tanks of the nation's school buses. And unless we start busing kids to Mars, that should probably cover it.

"Of course, taxpayers might be willing to foot this lavish bill if the smaller class sizes and larger bureaucracies of recent years had led to improved student outcomes. They haven't. Students at the end of high school score no better in reading and math today than they did in 1970, according to the Long Term Trends tests administered as part of the National Assessment of Education Progress. In science, their scores today are lower."

The merits of wide open parental choice—and the basic justice of it—are compelling, but the Constitution mentions neither the word 'education' nor the word 'school.' Congress and the president simply do not have a mandate to create such a program. More than that, a national private school choice program risks extending pervasive government regulation over private schools from the Potomac to the Pacific, homogenizing the options available to families and thus defeating the entire point of school choice.

It is far better and safer for presidential candidates to tout the merits of school choice and encourage their state level counterparts to put these programs into place. In that way, the varying experiences of the states—the so-called 'laboratory of federalism'—can help to identify and eliminate problems in their implementation."

It is both reckless and indefensible to form judgments about trends in U.S. student performance without taking into account the results of these respected international tests.

So will Democrats sever this $7,500 per pupil private school lifeline to protect their interests in the $24,600 per pupil DC public school system (yes, $24,600 – see the numbers here)? Will they weigh the prospect of continued teacher union support more heavily than the educations and futures of these 1,900 kids? We'll find out tomorrow.